Sunday, 6 October 2013

Lohit Devanagari Alpha Release

As most of us were waiting for the news of lohit devanagari release , I would like to mention the lohit devanagari alpha version has been released on 3rd sept & sucessfully reached to meet the goals previously described [1][2].

The main task that the project has gone through are :

Rewritting of all GSUB rules from scratch.

Support for both deva and dev2 script tag

Gone through testing on Harfbuzz as well with Uniscribe with expected results :)

GPOS tables intact.

Effectiveness and efficiency [3] (sfd file size is down by
28K and Binary file side is down by 4K)

Glyph naming part is also one of the important thing in the project . The discussion regarding the same can be viewed at [4]. At the end we come to the solution to follow AGL specification with the help of some script that will convert the naming to the unicode specifications. Also the testing was main part , during which we had gone through many bug fixes.Though this is an alpha release , little bug are yet to be fixed so if you came across it feel free to contact [5].

Here are the steps to download :

Steps for Linux :

Installing font (.ttf) file:
You can install .ttf font files by copying them to ~/.fonts directory.
Then execute fc-cache command and then relogin to use that font.

Steps for Windows :
You can just copy the .ttf file from [6]. copy it to windows/fonts/ folder .
and you are ready to use rather test it :) .

Basic motivation behind the project was existing open type specification is not
providing sufficient information for Indian script and font developer
need to create guess work while writing Open type tables. So we want to
have one specific guidelines for Indic scripts.

This alpha release will be much more useful for fixing of bugs , if any , thereby giving a step towards beta release.